A thriving player community is central to game discovery and meaningful engagement. This was the powerful theme behind Scopely’s lively conversations at GamesBeat Summit 2025. The company behind hit games like “MONOPOLY GO!” and “MARVEL Strike Force” led two sessions this year that spotlighted the community-driven experiences cultivated across their portfolio.
First, Shelby Johnson-Sapp, SVP of corporate strategy at Scopely, led a roundtable discussion, “Powering Play: Staying Ahead in a Dynamic Games Industry,” which dug into the challenges of building for the long term while navigating evolving player behavior and maintaining a player-first vision.
“For us, player-centrism isn’t just about listening to players – it’s about making sure they feel heard,” said Johnson-Sapp. She further underscored Scopely’s commitment to building community experiences that players return to for years: “Success for us is about playing one game for 10 years. That’s what we’re optimizing for – making your experience in that game deeper.”
In a separate fireside chat, Ryan Jacobson, VP and GM of “MARVEL Strike Force,” and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, co-founder and CTO at Discord, talked about the ways developers can design player communities that drive engagement, retention, and cultural relevance.
“Once you create the game and you put it out there, it’s really the community’s game at that point. It’s no longer yours,” Jacobson explained. “If you’re not listening to them, to their needs, what their wants are, you ultimately have the potential to fail.”
Authentic engagement where players hang out
Studios are increasingly finding that going where players are hanging out, whether it’s Reddit or Discord or another social platform, is a more authentic way to connect with and understand the fans who want to keep engaging even after they log out of the game.
But even when a community lives on another platform, its design and plan must be baked into the product development process, Vishnevskiy said, and be part of an ongoing strategy, rather than just bolted on as an afterthought.
“It’s recognizing that there’s so much choice,” he said. “Players are trying to figure out where they want to invest their time. Do they want to spend time with just any game, or a game where the developer actually cares and listens and is engaged with it? What we see works really well is when developers engage, show up, and show that they’re listening.”
Listening to players — at scale
A player community is composed of the whole player ecosystem across the social platforms they frequent. Improving the signal to noise ratio becomes a priority, and a challenge. To cut through the noise, developers can invite a representative collection of players to interact with in a more intimate setting, where they feel their voice is being heard. And that cohort can then act as ambassadors for the larger community. That’s why “MARVEL Strike Force” implemented what they call a Player Council.
“We knew that there was a wide range and variety of voices inside our community. We wanted to make sure that they at least felt heard and captured,” Jacobson said. “We tried to go to our community and say, you guys have these comments about the game. You have thoughts. You have feelings. How do we make sure that this is organized in a way where we can get some value out of it? A lot of times we’ve adjusted our road map to make sure we’re fitting the needs of our players, which has been a really positive thing.”
The “MARVEL Strike Force” team created a Discord server to house the council, which operates as a self-governing body with a multitude of player types and opinions. It’s a place where players offer comments and critical feedback, and where the studio can pose questions and dig into player concerns in a way that makes it clear those concerns are being included in the development process.
That turns players into champions for the game, Vishnevskiy said, even when a developer does simple things, like reaching out to the community once a patch is live.
“You’re showing up. You’re giving your time to them and they’re excited to see you there, but you’re also getting some nuggets from the ecosystem,” he said. “They’ll carry the message forward about those decisions, that you were listening to them.”
Ryan Jacobson agreed, adding, “The most important thing is what you touched on. They become your champions. They definitely do. Even if they maybe have feelings on the direction you’re taking it, they understand the why. They’ll say, no, they listened to us, we talked to them, this is why they think this is a great thing for the game.”
Adding social integrations directly into games
Games and platforms like Discord historically run in parallel, and there tends to be two broad types of player conversations: the friend groups and hangouts, where socialization is a bonus, and then the guild and clan areas for strategizing and planning in-game activities like raids.
Of course not every player will be on the same community platforms – and when gameplay conversations are held outside of the game itself, it can slow down communication, and make some players feel left out. Discord went on a mission to find a way to bridge the gap between players, and the result was a Social SDK. It’s a way for developers to leverage Discord’s social infrastructure, so that the friends list, the chat features, and the invite systems of the platform all work without a Discord account and free of charge, including the voice chat.
It’s a powerful tool right out of the box, and Strike Force players are already embracing it, Jacobson said.
“For us, development time and resources are always at a premium,” he said. “We can just take a lot of the existing features that you’ve built. It’s frictionless for our community, which has been amazing for us.”
Authenticity at the core
“You can’t force community,” Vishnevskiy said. “You can provide the building blocks, the social layers, the community layers, the community guidelines, but ultimately you have to embrace where the community is headed, as long as it’s within those guidelines, and not try to mold it into something it’s not. Facilitate it, participate in it, engage with it naturally. If you try to force things – go post these things, go do these things! – you’ll be rejected real quick.”
Playing games can be so much more meaningful when you’re playing with others, Jacobson added, and being part of a game where you know you’re seen and feel like you’re a part of the game’s growth and trajectory over time is a powerful motivator for engagement.
“We’re always trying to make decisions we believe they’re going to like,” he said. “When we know that we meet them in the middle and have these conversations, it’s been powerful for us. But you have to meet the players where they are.”